My Name: Matthew Sanborn Smith. My challenge: Write 1000 stories by the time I'm 50 years old. Current story count: 158. Current age: 47. (Yes, I know it will never happen. I push on regardless.)
The One-Thousand is made up of stories that are aimed at publication in professional venues.
I've been published at Tor.com, Nature, and Chizine, among others. Listen to me on the occasional StarShipSofa and every single Beware the Hairy Mango. Shoot me an e-mail at upwithgravity@gmail.com

Sunday, January 12, 2014

On Finishing And 146

Finished story 146 tonight and sent it out the door. Wouldn't it be great if the rest of the year rolled on like the last couple of days?

What happened is I thought I'd write a new story for Charles Coleman Finlay's guest issue of F&SF within the two week submission period. But I got off to a bad start this year because of my crazy, dizzy head (which is all better now, thank you), so I figured I wouldn't finish in time and submitted another story.

Yesterday after a couple of false starts at even newer stories, I realized I had literally hundreds of partial stories lying around on my hard drives, and why not finish them up? "Finish what you write" is an old maxim that Neil Gaiman, for one, always offers when asked for writing advice. I made a new wallpaper for my computer that's just a white background with the words, "It's all about finishing stories." Then I remembered a roughly thousand word story that seemed good to me even though I once thought I should add more. I reworked it and that was 145. Today I finished that story that was meant to be for F&SF and that was 146. So there you go. Tomorrow, I'll look for another unfinished story I can finish.